The Ancient Longevity Science That Modern Medicine Ignores | Dr. John Douillard, DC, CAP

Dr. John Douillard has spent more than 40 years proving ancient medicine with modern science. A chiropractor, Certified Ayurvedic Practitioner, bestselling author, and former Director of Player Development for the NBA's New Jersey Nets, he joins Dr. Brandon Crawford to reframe longevity around two systems Western medicine rarely watches: the lymphatic system and Agni, the body's digestive fire.

The conversation connects nasal breathing to brainwave coherence, the diaphragm to lymphatic drainage, and lost digestive strength to the wheat everyone now blames. Douillard's argument is blunt: the problem was never the food. It was a digestion and drainage system that went quiet, and the fix is older than modern medicine wants to admit.

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Dr. Brandon Crawford: I'll first have to acknowledge, you were talking about nasal breathing before it was cool, right? This isn't someone just jumping on the bandwagon. This is one of the original guys here.

Dr. John Douillard: I ended up getting a chance in '86 to go to India to try to figure out some of this Ayurvedic stuff.

Stayed there for a year and a half came back and started teaching medical doctors Ayurveda, and that's what I do today. After all these years, I write about the ancient medical wisdom and the modern science.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: These types of strategies are so foundational

Dr. John Douillard: If you have something that's around for thousands of years, still here today, and you have modern science, that's a really safe place for folks to start.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: This is how we should be living. It just makes sense.

Dr. John Douillard: I set out to try to figure out if we could replicate it, and we did. We published studies on it. we did that by changing how we breathe,

we had a group of athletes on a exercise bike at two hundred watts of resistance and their breath rates when their mouth were forty-eight breaths per minute. Same kids came back the next day, their breath rate was fourteen breaths per minute, The average person sitting here watching this podcast is probably like fifteen or sixteen breaths per minute.

We asked them how do they feel when they were doing the nose breathing versus the mouth breathing, and they were like a ten out of ten of perceived exertion when their mouth was open and a four out of ten when their mouth was closed.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: How in the world can we improve brain function but also body function if we meditate properly? What's going on there?

Dr. John Douillard: I wrote a whole thing about how to do this. You don't have to read the book. Here's what you do, Brandon, if you wanna get back into that zone.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Longevity Formula podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Brandon Crawford. Today's guest is Dr. John Douillard, a fellow chiropractor certified Ayurvedic practitioner, bestselling author, and founder of LifeSpa. For approximately four decades, he has worked at the intersection of Ayurveda, natural health, sports performance, breathing, nutrition, and longevity. He's the former director of player development for the New Jersey Nets and the author of seven health books, including "Body, Mind, and Sport," "The Three Season Diet," and "Eat Wheat."

His work is focused on translating the ancient principles of Ayurveda into principle strategies for modern physiology, resilience, and long-term health.

Dr. Douillard, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. John Douillard: Brandon, good to be here. Thank you

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Absolutely. So I'm real curious about your journey. How in the world have you navigated this life that you've been in and come to the conclusions and ended up where you're at currently?

Dr. John Douillard: It's a good question. I was in chiropractic college like you. I was taking a 500-hour acupuncture class, and I heard the word Ayurveda, and I was like, "Wait a minute." I mean, there's this, like, ancient system of medicine, and it was all about longevity is what I heard originally. I was like, you know, and I was really into Paul Bragg and, and Jack LaLanne and all these longevity guys.

So I was, like, super interested in it, and I went to a lecture. And the lecture guy was talking about Ayurveda and yoga and meditation, and I said — afterwards, I went up to him and said — "Hey, I'm training for an Ironman. I wondered if you could tell me what you guys think about doing an Ironman from this perspective."

And of course, they were like, "What is that?" And I had to tell them what an Ironman was, and they were like, "Why do you even do that? That's crazy." And I said, "I didn't really have an answer for that. No one ever asked me that before, I..." You know. And he, and he looked at me and he said, "Do you meditate?" And I go, "Yes, I do, in fact, meditate."

And he said, "Do you sleep when you meditate?" I go, "Deeply. It's awesome. I get this deep, deep sleep, and then I wake up and study." And, and he said, "No, no. Sleep is different than meditation. Meditation, you're supposed to be alert and resting at the same time, not conked out." I was like, "Oh, dang. That's not me."

So I said to him, I said, "What if I was able to, like, stay awake in my meditation and do all this exercise? Would it be okay?" And he said, "Yeah, I guess so." And, you know, he just kinda shifts me off to the next person. So I started going to meditation retreats on the weekend and started meditating more and training less to see if I could, like, stay awake, you know, in my meditation.

And I ended up doing that, like, once a month for a couple months. Then I went for a two-week retreat where I did yoga, breathe, meditate, yoga, breathe, meditate, eat a little, yoga, breathe, meditate, yoga, breathe, meditate, eat a little, sleep. And do that for, like, two weeks straight. It was crazy, boring. And I was just, you know, 'cause I wanted to-- you're so addicted to running and...

Anyway, I came out of that and I was training, and I was living in the South Bay in Cali-- in, in LA and training and, and competing, you know, at a fairly high level, I thought anyway. And all of a sudden, I started competing at a significantly higher level. I started winning some medals. Some of my friends thought I was on steroids.

Some of them actually learned to meditate 'cause they knew exactly what I was doing. And I went into this, a true story, and I, and I wrote about this in my book Body Mind Sport. I call it the jet fuel 'cause I was, like, in this three-month runner's high experience where I could, I could compete at such a high level and feel like I was, like, effortless.

Like, you know, your best race is your easiest race, that runner's high vibe? I was in that. And but not only in my sports, but academically, I had a bandwidth that was, like, unbelievably different than what I was doing before. And then three months later, it sort of disappeared and it sort of vanished. So I ended up getting a chance in '86 to go to India for, like, a four-week vacation to try to figure out how to learn some of this Ayurvedic stuff.

I ended up getting invited to stay there, stayed there for a year and a half came back and started teaching medical doctors Ayurveda, which made me kind of realize I need to put some science to this ancient wisdom, and that's what I do today. After all these years, I write about the ancient medical wisdom and the modern science 'cause, you know, if you have something that's around for thousands of years, still here today, and you have modern science, that's a really safe place for folks to start.

Science alone, as we all know, right, can prove whatever it wants. Coffee's good. Coffee's bad. Wheat's good. Wheat's bad. Meat's good. Meat's bad. You don't know. So that's why I really love s- you know, something that's been around for thousands of years, sort of centenarian kind of style, you know logic, right?

And then the science to back it up, that's what I do at LifeSpa.com. That's what I've been practicing for all... and teaching for all these years, the connection of the ancient wisdom and the science

Dr. Brandon Crawford: I have to, you know, definitely agree with you. I'm a runner. I love running. I totally understand the runner's high concept because it is something that I just yearn for, you know? I, I definitely strive to hit that place at least a couple of times a week. I had to stop running back in, I guess, November of last year.

I g- I got a pretty severe back injury, and it was, it was debilitating. It was bad. Like, I, I so missed it, and I missed that feeling, and I was getting pretty low. And then I did start focusing more on meditation. And so I w- I personally wasn't able to produce the same or similar runner's high, but I was definitely able to get more into a peaceful mindset and was able to at least bring myself, you know, out of that dip that I was getting into.

And I do love all the research that's showing what's actually going on in the brain when we meditate properly. So, can you maybe give some clarity on how in the world can we improve brain function but also body function if we meditate properly? What's going on there?

Dr. John Douillard: Well, you know, I can actually teach you how to get into the runner's high on a regular basis. We actually did research on that and published studies in the International Journal of Neuroscience, and we're, we're the first to actually prove that we can establish brainwave coherence and a meditative alpha state during vigorous exercise which is basically what happens when you, when you go into the runner's high.

The brain is calm, alpha meditative brainwaves. It's coherent. The whole brain's doing-- all the different parts of the brain are doing the same thing while the body's in vigorous activity. So it's like I call it the eye of the storm, right? The bigger the calm and the eye of the winds, the eye of the storm, the more powerful the winds.

And the runner's high is always a coexistence of opposites, where you have the dynamic activity, running fast as you can, whatever, with an internal experience of like my best race is my easiest race. You know, Roger Bannister ro-wrote the four-minute mile. He said, "I, I felt like I was going slow, like the world was standing still," right?

This is something we've all experienced. But so I set out to try to figure out if we could replicate it, and we did. We published studies on it. And we, we did that by changing how we breathe, by actually creating, using nose breathing versus mouth breathing, and using the nose breathing with a full exhalation where you engage an Ayurvedic breathing technique called Ujjayi Pranayama, which really just you constrict the back of your throat, create like a Darth Vader snoring sound.

And when you contract, and that automatically contracts your abdominal muscles, which are the secondary muscles of breathing. And that creates an abdominal diaphragmatic cardiac massage, which literally flips the brain into an alpha state, into a vagal kind of parasympathetic dominant response. So when we published studies on that, we had a group of athletes.

One came back and did nose breathing. Next day, they came back and did mouth breathing on a, on a exercise bike at two hundred watts re- of resistance, which is pretty significant. And their breath rates when their mouth were open were forty-eight breaths per minute. Same kids came back the next day, their breath rate was fourteen breaths per minute, right?

The average person sitting here watching this podcast is probably like fifteen or sixteen breaths per minute. We measured. We asked them how do they feel when they were doing the nose breathing versus the mouth breathing, and they were like a ten out of ten of perceived exertion when their mouth was open and a four out of ten when their mouth was closed.

And we measured their b-brainwaves, and when their brainwave-- when their mouth was open, the brainwaves were in a fight or flight beta state, super stressed out state. And when their mouth was closed and breathing through the nose, creating that abdominal constriction That brain went into a meditative calm.

So imagine, like, running as fast as you can, but your brain responding to that as a meditation. But take that as a model for life. Like, exercise is a stress. Well, we all know life is a stress. Well, what if I can handle exercise stress from that calm, composed place? Then I can then take that off the mat and bring that into my life so I can feel like I'm in that eye of the storm in the midst of my life.

Most of us are living out there in the winds of the storm, dodging crazy stuff flying around. It's stressful, and it takes us out. But if we can create that internal experience of composure and calm, which is just a flip of the switch in terms of your autonomic nervous system, what's more dominant, sympathetic or parasympathetic, and all this really cool stuff happens.

We actually measured the fight or flight nervous system during exercise, right? And normally, sympathetic fight or flight goes up a hundred percent and parasympathetic rejuvenation goes down to zero. But in our study, when the nose breathing was happening, the two opposite nervous systems coexisted. So it's like in my book, I wrote a whole thing about how to do this.

That's what the whole book was about, but I'll tell you exactly how to do it. You don't have to read the book. It's-- And I've written articles about it on my website called The Zone, how to get in the zone, and you can read it there for free. But here's what you do, Brandon, if you wanna get back into that zone.

It's a simple treadmill workout. Get on a treadmill two miles an hour, right? Breathe into your nose deeply in and deeply out, and use-- try to fully e-engage your abdomen as you breathe out all the way. In, out And now you're walking really slow, but you're breathing really deep. And you notice there's a space at the bottom and the top of each breath.

There's like no urgency to take the next breath, right? Do that for five minutes. Establish that rhythm of the breath. Then every fifteen seconds, increase the elevation of your treadmill by one degree. So one degree, fifteen second later, two degrees, three degrees. And ask yourself along the way as you're going up that hill, right, "Is my space between the breaths still maintained?"

And as soon as that space gets a little shorter, you don't have that sine wave, you know, space between the breath, and it starts to go a little faster, way before you have to open up your mouth, put the treadmill back to zero degrees. And now reestablish that original breath with the space between the breath. And then once that happens, one degree every fifteen seconds, c- and do it again. And now you're gonna go to four degrees. You still got the space between the breath. Five, six, seven, eight degrees, the breath gets a little short. Zero out the treadmill, reestablish the original breath again, and then go back up to it, and now you're gonna go to twelve degrees.

I did this for decades in a health club with banks of treadmills, with people coming in from-- for free for years. I taught this class for free. I've never seen anybody not see their self improve. So all of a sudden, now you're doing twelve degrees of elevation with the same breath you were doing four degrees of elevation before.

You're like, "Whoa, what's going on?" So then you go back down, increase the speed to two and a half or three miles an hour, and go through the same process. Now what's happening is as you're beginning to go faster and you lose the space between the breath, the body can't reconvert the blood lactate from the muscles into glycogen energy quick enough, so it dumps it back to your cardiovascular system, and you start breathing a little faster We are cultured and trained to go to the blood lactate threshold where the lactate builds up to such an extent we have to go anaerobic, and that's where we live as athletes in, on this planet.

But if you listen, which is hard to do for athletes, to that space between the breath, you can pick up the emergency coming down the pike before it becomes a fight or flight response, zero it out, reestablish the calm, and go back into your activity. And I've taught this to the New Jersey Nets. I did-- Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King did the forward to my book.

I've been teaching this to professional athletes for years. It just takes a little bit more patience 'cause most people, when they start breathing through the nose, they stink at it, and it's hard. But once you-- about three weeks after you try doing this, you're gonna start to find yourself go into the zone.

And the final stage of that is that your breath rate, instead of choosing to go faster, it chooses, as you continue to go up the hill on your treadmill or on your bike or whatever, the breath rate will choose to become longer and slower and deeper. You may have slipped into this in your, your athletic days, right?

Where all of a sudden you're running along and all of a sudden the breathing is effortless, you're slowing down, and you can seem that you can run f- you can run as fast as you like. And you're like, "What happened? I just had to slipped into this effortless space." So we just kind of created a plan to make sure that that happened every single time, and that's the study that we published.

So try that. Just, it, it is written, the whole thing is laid out on my website, you know. It's an article called The Zone and, and check it out. It's really cool, well-documented, and, and it's like you're creating a level of respiratory efficiency and you're taking parasympathetic dominance into s- a stressful world.

That's what we need to do on this planet

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah, I love that. I love that you're essentially using the body to then train the mind. And of course, my mind goes into all the neuroplasticity concepts and, you know, the ways that this is, you know, this is something I can give to patients and because look, you know, when I'm working with a complex neurological disorder, I mean, they're in that stressed out physiology.

They're whether they're in a fear paralysis or a Moro state, they're, you know, it's constant fight or flight for them. So these types of strategies are so foundational and I love that. I ha- actually, I'm gonna start using that. I'm gonna go to the zone. I'm gonna read through that. I'm gonna do it myself.

I-- when I start, when-- I'll first have to acknowledge, you were talking about nasal breathing before it was cool, right? I mean, before it was before it was a thing. So, this isn't someone just jumping on the bandwagon. This is, like, one of the original guys here. When I started looking into it I was reading information about how you should actually be breathing through your nose while you're running, right?

And so that was kind of a new concept to me. And you know, I'll typically run anywhere from four to six miles at a time usually. And of course, I, I wasn't thinking about my breathing. I was just running. It was a way to clear my head. It was, you know, I love doing it. And when I started to try to breathe through my nose, initially it was like a panic attack, right?

It was like, "Oh my gosh, I feel like I'm suffocating. I can't breathe." And once I got over that and it was like, "Okay, I'm not gonna pass out. I'm gonna be okay," it was so interesting because I could run longer, I could run faster. It, you could just feel the stress melt away. The body felt better. And it's essentially my default state now when I run 'cause I've trained myself to be able to do it, where initially it was a challenge.

But I love the concepts that you just went through. Is this something that say someone with Parkinson's, dementia a chronic pain disorder, something like that could they take that advice and start implementing it and actually start to see changes in their health state?

Dr. John Douillard: You know, when I wrote the book, Body Mind Sport, back-- That was nineteen ninety-four, a long time ago, b-and did that research. I started getting letters in the mail, right? Not emails, 'cause they didn't exist back then. And I just was shocked by how many letters I got about people saying it cured my back pain and my asthma and my emphysema, and, like, one condition after another, and I was like, "What the heck is going on here?"

Well, for sure, what you're actually doing is you're teaching your body how to handle a stressful situation from a parasympathetic repair-rejuvenated state, right? So that's kinda cool. But what also happens, what you're-- when you're breathing through your nose, is you're engaging your diaphragm. And your diaphragm is, of course, a breathing muscle.

But what people don't realize, it's the number one pump of your body's lymphatic system, right? And in Ayurvedic medicine, the lymphatic system is the study of longevity. That's like their whole thing. So, you know, in, in our culture, we think longevity is mitochondrial energy. How can we give the body more mitochondrial energy?

From the Vedic perspective, and they have a branch of Ayurveda thousands of years old, fully, completely focused on the lymphatic system as their tool for longevity, and the lymph is trying to do three things: take out the trash of every cell of your body, deliver fatty acids for baseline energy and hormonal precursors to every cell of your body as needed, and also carry your immune system.

Really, really important things if you wanna stay on the planet for a while. And what the lymphatic system is doing is taking out the trash. Now, you-- I'm sure you know that there-- When you make energy in the mitochondria, there's free radical damage, reactive oxygen species, and that builds up. And as we get older, we don't get rid of that as well.

So from the Vedic perspective, it wasn't like how well we can get the good stuff in the blood, the energy for the mitochondria. It's-- The limiting factor is how well we get the bad stuff out. Is your lymphatic system taking the trash out of the cell efficiently enough where the body can actually make new mitochondrial energy?

And if it can't, the body won't make it. And the, and the, and there'll be DNA damage in the cell as a result of that inability to move out the trash. And there's all kinds of research now about how melatonin, which is the free radical scavenging agent that the body uses inside the cell to clean up that trash, and that declines with age.

We lose lymphatic function as we cl- as we age as well, and we also don't digest as well as we should as we age, which is why my book, Eat Wheat, sort of relates to all this, because most people don't digest their food well, and undigested proteins and fats, gluten being one of the top ones, will find their way into the lymphatic system, create lymph congestion, extra weight around your belly and hips Congestion of the skin-associated lymph, which is why you get skin rashes and things like that, and then congestion of the brain's lymph and lymphatic system, which can create anxiety, depression, brain fog, and all these kind of, kind of cognitive-related issues.

So if you look at the Vedic approach, they were like, "Okay, let's reboot digestive function. Let's decongest the lymphatic system." And all of a sudden, you've got the, the ability to get really good digestive proteins and fats into the system and feed the body with the mitochondrial support it needs, and you're supporting lymphatic flow to help take the trash out.

And they talked about circadian rhythms thousands of years ago. They talked about aligning biological clocks with circadian rhythms, so we don't have this circadian, you know, you know, disruption that we have today that is altering our ability to get the infrared light from the sun to activate mitochondrial energy, and that same infrared light creates the melatonin to clean up that free radical damage.

And as we age, that declines, and that can be mitigated very easily. So you-- so all of a sudden, you look at a whole different model of longevity is let's focus on making sure that we get the good stuff in, not by giving you supplements, but actually making your digestion work better. Obviously, feed the body with healthy food, seasonal food even is a whole nother thing.

But also let's make sure we evaluate the drainage system, the lymphatic the immune-carrying system, and the delivery of fatty acids, which is for hormone precursing and skin and the lining of all your arteries. And, you know, your skin is on the inside. This skin on the outside is less than one percent of the epithelium in your whole body.

So when you think about the importance of skin, it's critically important. So that's kind of why, how it all kind of fits together for me was the, the nose breathing got me understanding the, how the diaphragm is really a lymphatic pump and what that lymphatic pump really does. And now I'm going like, "Wow, this is a whole different world."

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah, absolutely. So let's do this. Before we go too much further, help the listeners understand a little bit more about Ayurveda in general. What, what is it? It's an old system-- I don't want to call it a system. I don't know, maybe it is a system. Old paradigm, but it still applies, obviously, and it applies very well.

And I think what you're telling us is that not only does it apply, but now we're proving it with modern science. So can you give us a little bit more background on what that is?

Dr. John Douillard: So Ayurveda, Ayu means life, Veda means truth or science, right? So it's the science or the deep study of nature. It's been around for thousands of years. The All Indian Ayurveda Congress today is still the largest medical organization on the planet. So it's not like it's some new thing or some dying thing.

It's still very, very much alive and well. And like I said, if it's been around for so long, there must be something to it, otherwise it wouldn't have lasted for two and a half thousand years. the kind of the cool thing about it is that you don't have to learn Indian words. You don't have to become...

It's nothing to do with the Indian culture. It's a universal deep study of nature. Like I said, it talks about understanding biological clocks and circadian rhythms and when to eat and when to exercise, how to align your lifestyle. Talks about eating seasonal foods, right? I mean, this is the-- I wrote, my second book was called The Three Season Diet, eating foods from the three grocery lists or the three harvests in nature, right?

You got a summer harvest, right? We all know. You have a fall harvest for winter eating, and we have a spring harvest. There's, of course, four seasons, but there's one season is always dormant. So we interact with nature from that perspective. Now we have like, this is sort of written thousands of years ago, and now we have Stanford research that says the bugs in the soil change from season to season to season.

The bugs in our gut, according to hunter-gatherer studies, change from season to season to season. And those bugs are called bacterial endophytes. And those bugs on the food at the right time of the year actually provide, like, deep immunity during the winter months, decongest you in the allergy springtime months, help you dissipate heat in the summer months.

The microbes on the food, the microbes on your herbs, which shouldn't be sterile extracts, it should be the whole plant. That's a really important distinction 'cause we just take everything. We spray pesticide on our food, so it's sterile. We, we soak our herbs in alcohol, so they're sterile, and we don't have the intelligence of the, of the plant anymore inoculated in our gut with the right microbes for the right season, right?

This is a big problem. We have an extinction event, according to Stanford Research, that says we don't have diversity because we sterilize everything. So if I took the microbes out of you, you'd be a completely different person. Yet we take herbs and nutraceuticals and supplements, and we take foods that are all somewhat sterile, and we're not inoculating the gut with the right bugs for the right season.

So that's just like Really when you think about like super logical, but now we have the science that go, you have this bad idea to not eat what nature's providing at the right time of the year. So to-- I mean, I wrote a book about it, but you don't have to read the book. You can just get these grocery lists for free on my website.

There's a winter list, a summer list, and a spring list. Circle the foods on the list in the right season, eat more of those foods, and now you're getting the right bugs and the right time of the year to give you the right benefit from the food that you're eating. And there's, there's some of the foods that have asterisks where there's just super foods for each season.

So I just try to make it super simple and free for folks. Like, just get these lists, take them to your grocery store, circle the foods you like, and just eat more of them. And now you're at least you're starting to align your food and the microbes. Of course, try to make it organic or get it out of your garden.

You know, get your body's biological clocks and rhythms kind of aligned and that's kind of a, you know, an ancient concept just now being understood in modern science. I mean, it's really is emerging science.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. I, I think it's great. It's almost like there's actually a creator and all of these things were put into motion for a reason, and we're supposed to live by the natural rhythms of the day and the year. But no, no, no, we know better, so we're going to accumulate every food from around the world and have it accessible at any point in time for you, and we feel like we're so smart in doing that, but man, we're really causing a great demise.

So it, it makes me think of this, right? So I, of course, I, I do recommend supplements at times, you know, but obviously foundational, we do tell people about circadian biology, when to eat, how to eat all of those things, right? So I've never been a proponent of eat whatever you want whenever you want, just take these supplements when...

That's not ever what we're talking about. We have to be foundational. I was actually talking about this with a very rare condition one of my patients has just yesterday, and he's wanting to do a clinical trial and all these things. And I said, "Look, do whatever you want, but get your foundation set," right?

And we talked about this exact thing right here. But it makes me think about something we recommend for a lot of our patients, and that's humic and fulvic acids. And the thing about it is, look, if you're actually eating food from the ground, you're getting your humic and fulvic acids, right? But we're not, and that's the thing.

That's a problem, and that, it, it's just, it's a problem. But that's a good segue into this discussion about circadian biology because, yes, we have certain foods during, you know, certain times of year. And before I go there, I do have a question for you. Does your food list, does that apply to all areas of the world, or is it more specific to the Americas, or is it ubiquitous?

Dr. John Douillard: It really does apply to all areas of the world. Obviously, the tropics are gonna always be a little bit different, but even in the tropics, you've got hot seasons, rainy seasons. You know, you've got different... You do have seasonal changes. Their foods do harvest at different times. So you will see, you know, the, you know, during the colder months, you'll have the foods that have been, been cooking under the ground or in the ground for a longer period of time.

The nuts, the seeds, the root vegetables, which are gonna be more dense, and they're gonna be eaten during the cold season. Every time there's a cold season, the digestion is going to be stronger. This is good science behind this. And and, and as we go into the hot season, you're going to change the food from being like, you know, kind of low...

Think about the springtime. It's a low carbohydrate time of the year, right? And the food's coming out of the ground. There, there's no pizza, there's no pasta coming out of the ground in the spring. It's an austere, even calorie-restricted, sort of lower kind of food intake time of the year the bugs in the gut, according to the hunter-gatherer tribes, are more what are called actinobacteria, which are designed to get energy from the fat and the fiber.

But then when you look at the end of the summer, when all the starches and the fruits are coming out of the ground, and there's more carbohydrates being harvested, the microbes in the s- hunter-gatherers change to what are called bacteroidetes, which are really good at delivering starch into the system.

So the fuel supply changes in an annual cycle from fat in the winter and spring to carbohydrates during the summer. So we didn't have the same fuel every day, every day, every day, which we've been doing in America with, with super high processed carbohydrate food. We had a, we had a, a, a, a full sup- fuel supply that would change from season so the body wouldn't get really, really good at delivering sugar as energy and then end up with a culture of, you know, epidemic pre-diabetes.

The fuel supply was supposed to change, and that's what these grocery lists help you do, is they go, "Okay, here guys, we're in the spring. You know, eat what nature provided." This is a lower carbohydrate time of the year. You're gonna get more protein in the winter, maybe even more animal protein in the winter and spring 'cause there's nothing coming out of the ground.

But come summer, why would you kill your chickens when you can't eat the food out of your garden fast enough during the summer months? And ancient cultures knew that if they hunted during the summer, they would easily over-hunt, and by winter and spring when they needed those chickens and their turkeys, whatever, in their local area, they would have over-hunted and they would starve to death, and many cultures did starve to death be- literally because of that.

So when you look at the, how nature organized it, and many ancient cultures, even in Tahiti, like in the... They had decreed, the, the king would decree that there are certain foods that you didn't eat. There were periods of scarcity that they decreed, and that was how you, how they survived, and like Easter Island didn't because some kings weren't so smart, and they, and they ended up screwing up their own culture.

So that's the beauty of understanding how to live in harmony with nature. Yeah, a little more animal protein during the colder winter months when it's giving you... It's what the squirrels are doing, eating nuts and seeds to insulate and, and give you s- reserve energy for the cold winter months. No carbohy- no carbohydrates in the spring gives you that naturally occurring ketogenic diet, which is really good in the short term, not for the rest of your life.

And then you have a higher carbohydrate diet in the summer months, which provides, you know, a cooling. And in fact, there's an enzyme called amylase, you know, that we started making our own about two million years ago. And that amylase in our bodies to this day still increases s- in a circadian way at the end of the summer in all of us more than it is in the winter.

So our circadian biology is still saying, "Hey, here's more amylase so you can digest the roots and the tubers and the grains and all that because That's what our ancestors did for millions of years. They found gluten in the teeth of ancient humans, the University of R- U- Utah, in humans, early humans three and a half million years ago.

So they've been eating gluten for a long time, and it was a lot easier to sit in the, in a, in the grasslands of Africa and pick the wheat berries from barley or wheat and grind it up and have a gruel and feed their family after a couple hours than try to, like, kill a wooly mammoth. That was probably a little more challenging, right?

Which we did, but not, like, all the time. So the idea that grains are bad is really an unfortunate, What, and the reason why people think it's bad is 'cause people can't digest harder to digest foods anymore, so we blame the food. And a lot of biohackers say, "Well, don't eat grains and nuts in season, lectins and goitrogens and oxalates, and don't eat, don't eat, don't eat."

And I'm going like, "This is the craziest thing I've ever heard." Instead of saying, "Let's go fix the reason why I can't digest those foods," fix the digestion as opposed to taking the food out of the diet, which we've been eating for millions of years. And those foods, harder to digest, create hormesis, a little irritation in the intestinal lining that is responsible for gut immunity.

And when you start bubble wrapping your diet and baby-fooding your diet, you lose the reason for gut immunity. And then we have immune issues like we didn't do very well with COVID. Well, maybe that's 'cause th- 80% of the population have some type of digestive weak link. Well, everybody says, "Gluten is bad.

It's the poison." No, it's not. You've lost digestive strength. Let's fix that. Eat healthy versions of that wheat in season, and y- watch what happens

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Right. And so I can just kind of relate with my story, right? So when I figured out I have Hashimoto's and some other issues going on, and I did all my food testing, environmental chemical, toxin, all this kind of stuff I was highly reactive to gluten. I was. But my gut lining was a train wreck.

And so I did stop consuming the reactive foods, gluten being one of them, but it wasn't my long-term strategy. My long-term strategy was let's address the neuroimmune axis, let's repair the gut lining, let's repair the immune system in the gut, et cetera. And I've actually done follow-up testing since.

All my neurological antibodies have fallen off. I still have one that I'm working on. So that's all gone into remission. I have gone into remission with Has- Hashimoto's, but if I get too stressed out, then it pops back up again. But that being said, I was able to start eating gluten again with no reaction, right?

And I actually had celiac markers. And I do wanna say, like, look, if you have celiac, I'm not telling you to go eat gluten. But because I did repair myself, I did repair my systems, I adhered to circadian rhythms. I, you know, I did a lot of the things that we're talking about, plus the neurological side.

So I focused on neuroplasticity and, and rehabbing my neuroimmune axis and whatnot. And then I'm, of course, I'm a laser guy, so I use a lot of laser therapy. But I was able to start eating gluten again. Now, if I'm stupid and get too busy and stressed out and, you know, start staying up too late and all this kind of stuff, I can't.

Shocker, right? So I mean, it's like you have to keep yourself in check, but it can be done. It's not easy, but it can be done. And it's becoming more and more challenging, honestly, with the way society is moving, and I do wanna kinda talk about that here in a little bit. But before we go there the concept in Ayurveda, this concept of...

Is it Agni? A-G-N-I,

Dr. John Douillard: Agni, yeah. Yeah

Dr. Brandon Crawford: that what-- Is that essentially what you're defining here for us, or is that something different?

Dr. John Douillard: No, that's-- the Agni means fire, and it's your digestive fire. Think of your, your pepsin and your hydrochloric acid. And if you don't have... And I'll quote a study for you that said, "If you don't have the ability to break down the proteins," and that's hydrochloric acid, "and you don't have good bile flow to break down your fats, those fats and proteins will go incompletely digested into your intestinal tract."

And the study showed the molecules will be too big to feed you, and they'll get uptaken into the collecting ducts of your lymphatic system. And that will create the beginning of extra weight around your belly. You know, lymph, your skin-associated lymph gets congested. Your skin starts, your complexion starts to look funky.

You get joint aches. You can't take the trash out. You get immune compromise. Your brain lymph gets congested. You get brain fog. That's why people, when they eat wheat, they get kind of brain foggy. That's because the undigested gluten ended up in their lymph, the brain lymph, and all of a sudden-- And guess who's the pump of the brain lymph?

It's your diaphragm. Oh, we're back to the breathing thing again. And what's interesting about Hashimoto's is, you know, before Hakaru Hashimoto got his name named after, you know, Hashimoto's disease, it was called thyroiditis lymphomatosa, thyroiditis lymphadenitis. Everybody knew in the early nineteen hundreds that Hashimoto's, that condition, was a lymphatic condition.

But we don't know that anymore. Now we just think it's Hashimoto's, let's fix the numbers. And what you did, which was like brilliant, you figured out, "I'm gonna go heal the lining of my gut. I got rid of my, my, my hyperreactive markers. Now I can actually begin to eat gluten again." And that is-- that's like what-- nobody else is doing that.

Everybody's saying, "Well, don't eat, don't eat. That's your con--" And now we go down the road of more extreme diets, restricted diets, then you end up with nutritional deficiencies. What most people also don't know, as you know, is that people with gluten intolerance and celiac, taking wheat out of the diet doesn't solve their problem.

It just makes them not re-- They just, they just don't eat the aggravator. But they end up with long-term nutritional deficiencies for decades after that because they never fix the lining of the gut, which you did. And that's what Ayurveda is about. Heal the environment, reboot the coordinated effort of stomach acid, bile flow, pancreatic enzymes, get that digestion working, decongest the lymphatic system, and get the system of getting the good stuff in and the bad stuff out back online, and eat healthy foods without the processing and the pesticides, and watch what happens.

Because it's really not rocket science. Really, it's very simple, really, right, when you think about it.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah, it just makes sense. And I also tell people, "Look, if you're just going to eliminate these foods and that's all you're gonna do, then guess what? In a matter of time, you're just gonna be as reactive to the foods you are eating because you didn't fix the problem. So you're going to create the same storm to different round of foods."

And I saw this for years where the functional medicine doctor or whoever's doing it, they'll just rerun the food panel and go, "Oh, okay, here's the foods that you have to avoid now." It's like, what? Like, come on, this, this doesn't make any sense. Anyway,

Dr. John Douillard: I lo- I love how R- RFK praises chiropractors because how you think and how I think is the most logical way to think about this. But when you go into the... And I, and I'm not against Western medicine, but they don't-- they think like you. They just do a food panel. They-- "Here are these foods you're reactive.

Get off that food." Six months later, you do another, you know, you know, hypersensitive food panel, and now there's another list of foods to get off of, and we're not even thinking about the upstream cause of this concern. It just makes no logical sense to me that why that ha- why that's happening. But thank God for chiropractic because we think differently

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Absolutely. I mean, when you're, you were talking about Ayurveda, right? It's been around for thousands of years, and there's gotta be something to it. I mean, chiropractic hasn't been around for that long, but at the same time, we've been attacked over, and over, and over again, and we're still here, and there's a reason that we're still here

So y- your, your more recent work, right? You're starting to talk about more about connecting with consciousness and quantum concepts and, and all of these types of things. Then even in July of this year, you, you you talked on a podcast about peptides. And so where, where are you taking this?

What, what are your thoughts right now?

Dr. John Douillard: You know, after studying this for like forty years, what I found was that what's kind of cool about the ancient wisdom is like, they weren't stupid. They really knew something, and it's really profound. And, and our culture just wants to sweep the old under the rug and do these new biohacking tools, which sometimes can work.

But sometimes if you really watch the biohackers closely, they keep changing. You know, every year is a new, "Well, we shouldn't eat this. Now we-- It's okay to

Dr. Brandon Crawford: man. Every week they're changing. Come on.

Dr. John Douillard: Okay. So what's neat about the ancient wisdom is it hasn't changed in a thousand, two thousand years, and it still isn't changing. Like in my book, I wrote a book called "The Three Season Diet" about eating with the seasons.

That book was written in two thousand. It's still one hundred percent accurate today because it's based on logic of nature. Where you take any other diet book that's been around for, you know, twenty, thirty years now, they're different. I mean, they're like, that's like, "Oh, we, we-- that's not any... that good anymore."

So the, the idea is that, that, th-that the, the fact that this is time-tested and it doesn't change really means that it's something that we can really trust, and that's kind of the, the beautiful thing about it

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Nice. So I wanna, I wanna pick your brain a little bit, and I know we're coming up on time, but there's a big thing going on in society right now and, and, and that's these concepts around AI. Okay? And it's something that I'm very, very interested in. Almost every day I'm reading new articles, I'm listening to new interviews.

I'm, I'm trying to figure out what the heck's going on and, and talk about something that's hard to keep up with. Oh my gosh, it's nuts. But with all this discussion about ancient healing and these, these concepts that just make sense, how does AI fit in? Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? Is this the end of the world?

What are we looking at here?

Dr. John Douillard: I think, you know, like we were talking about a minute ago, what's-- what I've learned about Ayurveda was that the more subtle it is in the body, the more powerful it is in the body. So, and that's where we have like circadian rhythms, right? We can't see them, but they govern like everything. Nobel Prize-winning science.

The microbiome, we can't see them. It's changed our whole world from a medical perspective, understanding what's really going on So the more subtle things are, the more powerful they are. We have photon emissions coming out of our DNA, thousands per minute, that can either be coherent or incoherent. And when they're incoherent 'cause of stress, they create damage, DNA damage.

But when you meditate, yoga, and breathe, you create coherent photon emissions which can heal, carry information, even carry our thoughts. And these photons are really subtle, like they're photons of light. And in Ayurveda, they said the cause of disease was when the quantum fields, which are frequencies, waveforms, become physiology, become par-particles, and those particles forget that they're part of that field.

That's what they said the cause of disease was. So at the most subtle level, that kinda makes sense, 'cause we all know we came from these fields, and now we're particles. When the particles become dense and patterned based on stress and, and, and dysfunction, rigidity, then we lose the connection to the field.

So photons of light, which are who we really are coming out of our DNA all the time, they are... By definition, they can be particles of light or frequencies of light, so they live at the junction between field and physiology. So that's what Ayurveda understood, was that if you actually meditate, yoga, and breathe and bring your nervous system down, you can actually begin to f- b-begin to have a level of awareness of that subtle junction point between field and physiology.

And that's why we have good science now showing when you meditate, yoga, breathe, the DNA def... The incoherent DNA photon emissions start to dial down, and now you're left with the coherent ones which can carry information, carry our thoughts, and even carry intention according to some emerging studies. So that's kinda like the consciousness side of it.

Like, wait a minute. You know, maybe we really do need to dial down all the crazy thinking and start to allow ourselves to train our body to feel. It's called interoception. We have interoceptors in

our body and our diaphragm, and all over our body doing that, and naturally are there to enhance self-awareness. So we can perceive subtle energy in a way that our mind is always busy going outside trying to figure out the outside world, where the interoception's trying to help us figure out the inside world and our connection to that field, and that's where that consciousness really goes.

Now, AI Understands that. As you type out on AI, they're gonna, "Oh yeah, that's a thing for sure. Here's how it works." And so I think the more that we use AI to, to, to help us understand the more subtle aspects of us and realizing that this human instrument is designed to perceive subtle energy better than any other instrument out there, that we have something really special.

All we gotta do is, like, turn off the outside world, you know, once in a while, meditate, dial down, create a st- silence in your nervous system so you can begin to enhance and train your own level of self-awareness. And then, you know, all of a sudden you're not so affected by the ups and downs and craziness in the outside world.

You're sort of what we call field independent. You're not... Your happiness isn't based on only what's happening. You actually have a level of calm like that where we started, right? The eye of the storm, that runner's high. But you have that all the time and you're like, "You know what? I'm f- I hail from this place that no one can take away from me, my own abil- ability to be peaceful, calm, joyful, kind and loving."

And that's a great place to, to d- to be. I don't care where that information comes from, but that's a fundamental truth that's, that I think we all can agree upon.

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Yeah. I was your discussion there makes me think of a lecture I was listening to. It was Feynman I think it was back in the 1980s. It was either the '80s or late '70s. I mean, it was a, it was a long time ago. And he was in front of a, a group of students, and someone actually asked him, "Do you think one day computers will be as intelligent as humans?"

And his answer was really profound, and it still applies today. He essentially told them, and I don't remember verbatim, but basically said: Look, the information processing speed of a computer is going to far exceed the human capacity to, to crunch numbers and to process data. He said, however, the human brain learns via experience.

And essentially what he was referring to were these quantum fields. I mean, he's, he's a physicist, right? He, he's, he definitely understands all of that. And he said the, the computer doesn't have that ability, right? And so he said, so on one, on one hand, yeah, the, the ability, the, quote, "intellect," if you will, is going to exceed that of humans.

However, this whole quantum field concept, this emotional intelligence, this experiential learning component, he said, "I don't think computers will ever get there." Now, I think if you were to talk to, you know, Elon Musk or some of these other guys out there, I think that, you know, they're trying to solve that issue just like they've essentially solved the concept of embodiment with AI, or at least they're really trying to solve the concepts of embodiment.

But but I tend to agree with you, right? The there's something about this thing called life that is not going to be able to be replicated by a robot or by some type of AI processing. But it-- if we navigate this correctly, we could then use that to our benefit. So it's just a really interesting thing, and it's, you know, it's kinda scary when you really start to think about it too much and you go too far into the deep end.

But I love your perspective, so thank you for that. So, well, is there anything else that you would like to add to this conversation before we sign off today?

Dr. John Douillard: No, I think we touched on a lot of really cool things. You know, I just like to invite folks to my website where I've-- basically, I write, we've got over fifteen hundred articles. Really a library of free articles with the ancient wisdom and modern science. You just type in your health concern and, you know, you know, whether it be consciousness or biophoton emissions or lymphatic or brain lymph or weed, whatever we talked about today, there's articles there that you can go and take a deeper dive and really begin to understand how to reboot your digestive strength.

You know, we've got a article called The Digestive Health Quiz. You can just ask-- take yourself, take a quiz about what part of your digestion is broken. There's a lymphatic quiz. We ask about, about is-- how is your lymphatic system doing? So I put all this information, that's kind of our business model, is put all this information out for free for folks, give them a resource library where they can really dive deep and help heal themselves.

And of course, we have an Ayur-- I've been formulating Ayurvedic herbs, whole herbs for, for decades now. And so we have an Ayurvedic store where people can go and, and, you know, look at our books and, you know, and, and more knowledge, but also our entire Ayurvedic store that, for herbs that I formulated over the years is there as well at LifeSpa, L-I-F-E-S-P-A.com and sign up for our newsletter.

I put articles out all the time, always new research coming about. That's what's funny. I always thought when I first started, probably write two or three articles about ancient wisdom and modern science, and now, you know, there's so much research buried in the medical journal that, that is just not in medical practice.

It just sits in the journals rotting away. And that's what I try to bring to light, 'cause so much of that research has been done proving these ancient concepts. But Western medicine just ignores it 'cause they wanna do the... They just wanna put out the fire, the disease fire, give you the herb for the symptom, give the herb or the d-drug for the symptom.

While there's all this research about the cause of these conditions, that's just not, not applied in our system. And Ayurveda talked about that. We as chiropractors understand that kind of thinking, and that's kinda why I fell in love with Ayurveda, 'cause it gave me kind of a, kind of a really cool philosophy that aligned with what we learned, you know, growing up, you know, in school

Dr. Brandon Crawford: Well, we'll put all that information, the links and, and how to find Dr. Douillard and all of this great information in, in the show notes and all the places that you can find that information. So, I've thoroughly enjoyed this. I, I love the discussion about how ancient wisdom is not so old and, and crusty, right?

This is proven. This is how we should be living. It just makes sense, right? And so I've really enjoyed this conversation. If you've enjoyed this conversation, if you know someone that is sick or suffering or just needs help in life, this information is for them. This is... That's why we're actually doing this, right?

We're taking time out of our day to help people like you and to help people like those, so please share this information with them. Dr. Douillard, thank you again for your time. I've really enjoyed this

Dr. John Douillard: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Brendan. Appreciate it.